Our Services
Distory works with foundations, development organisations, governments and multilateral institutions to decide what an organisation says before anything gets written or filmed. Our team has built communications strategies for partners including IGAD, UNHCR and the African Wildlife Foundation organisations whose work is complex, technical and easy to misread from the outside.
The work begins with the context, not the content. We map the programme, the stakeholders and the communications environment an organisation is operating in, then build the narrative architecture that sits on top of it: messaging frameworks, narrative pillars, thought leadership positioning for principals and executives, and the reputation and media engagement plan that carries it. Where a client is a public institution or a donor-funded programme, we align that architecture with institutional strategy and reporting obligations so that the communications work strengthens accountability rather than sitting beside it.
A strategy is only as good as the work that carries it. Our creative team turns positioning into things people actually see: campaign concepts, copy, identity systems, motion and graphic design and the brand architecture that holds it all together.
We write for the African market and we write in it. Our copywriters work across English, French, Arabic, Portuguese and several national languages and we write, translate and proofread in-house rather than passing text to a vendor and hoping the meaning survives. Brand development runs underneath all of it. How an organisation looks and feels, what it promises, what impression it leaves and whether it stays in memory are commercial questions, not cosmetic ones. We build identity systems that hold up across a policy brief, a field photograph, a broadcast spot and a phone screen because our clients are usually using all four in the same week.
Film is where Distory has been recognised most publicly. Our documentary The Silent Pandemic was awarded the Regional Antimicrobial Resistance Champion Media House Award by the World Health Organization, selected from 53 entries, in recognition of our work raising awareness of AMR across the African region.
We produce across full range social video, broadcast and radio commercials and long-form documentary, blending photography, videography, animation and sound engineering. What distinguishes the work is the reporting behind it. We go to the field. We spend time with the people a programme is meant to serve, and we build the film around what they tell us rather than around what the commissioning organisation already believes.
Distory’s Social Media Strategist has built and run social media strategies for organisations including UNHCR and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, developing programmes that measurably grew their online presence and brand value.
We manage accounts end to end. That means content calendars built to a strategy rather than a posting schedule, community engagement handled by people who understand the sensitivities of the sectors our clients work in, paid campaign management, and the data analysis that tells you what is actually working.
We also build the destination. Websites and applications are where owned and earned attention finally lands, and a channel strategy that pushes people toward a weak site wastes the spend that got them there. We design and build both, with the same storytelling logic running through them.
Some things only happen in a room. Summits, launches, convenings and consultations are where partnerships get made and where an organisation’s narrative is either confirmed or quietly undermined and they are unusually unforgiving, because there is no second take.
We handle the communications around global convenings end to end: the messaging that goes out before, the media operation and content capture during and the knowledge products and documentation that give the event a life afterwards. Our team has run this for continental and intergovernmental bodies whose delegates arrive from a dozen countries with a dozen sets of expectations, which is where the planning matters most, briefing packs, speaker preparation, run-of-show communications and stakeholder engagement mapped to who actually needs to be moved.
We put in the effort to know before we act. Every Distory engagement starts with research and for a growing share of our clients the research is the engagement. The evidence base that a communications strategy, a policy position or a funding case is built on.
Our work here covers market research, corporate intelligence, stakeholder mapping, programme analysis and communications environment scanning. We have delivered communication and research solutions in thirteen countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mali and Côte d’Ivoire which means we bring comparative context rather than a single-market view. Our teams combine communications professionals with researchers and analysts, so the findings arrive in a form that can be acted on, not filed.
